the 2006 Marx memorial address
2007 Karl Marx oration by Mary Davis editor of Communist Review
W
60p daily from your newsagent and online at www.morningstaronline.co.uk daily paper of the anti-war movement
Communist Party communist-party.org.uk
www.solidnet.org www.marxlibrary.net Stunning hammer and sickle flags £7 post free Send payment cheques to CPB or go to www.communist-party.org.uk NEW! Che Guevara and Rainbow Peace flags Marx A3 poster £3 post free
Join the fight for peace and socialism I want more information o please tick to join the Communist Party/Young Communist League o name address age if under 25
phone
e mail return to Communist Party, Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Road, Croydon, CR0 1BD
e are here today to commemorate Marx’s birth in May 1818, but lest it be thought that the annual oration is a cranky fo rm of stone worship, it is appropriate to remind ours e l ves of the enduring importance of Marx’s ideas. G i ve n that Marx’s writings would fill at least 55 volumes, I cannot pretend to do justice to his wo rk. Howe ver, one of the best summaries of his contri bution was given by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, in the eulogy he delivered to Marx three days after the latter’s death in 1883. Engels argued that Marx made two major discove ries: 1. the law of development of human history – that is, historical materialism, and 2. the special law of motion gove rning the p r e s e n t - d ay capitalist mode of production In Engels (much misunderstood) wo r d s : ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of d e velopment of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an ove rg r owth of ideology, that mankind mu s t fi rst of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, b e fore it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; I say much misunderstood because this passage is often used by those who reject historical materialism to assert that Marx was a crude economic determinist: the infamous base/superstructure argument. Anyone who has read the ‘18th Brumaire’, ‘Class Struggles in France’ or the ‘German Ideology’ (and much more) will know that there was nothing crude about Marx’s analysis and it betrays no signs of economic determinism. But, as Engels argues, historical materialism was not the only great discove ry. ‘Marx also revealed the special law of motion gove rning the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.The discove ry of surplus value s u d d e n ly threw light on the probl e m , in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of
‘Marx also revealed the special law of motion governing the pre s e n t - d ay capitalist mode of production, and the b o u rgeois society that this mode of production has cre at e d . The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been g roping in the dark.’